geekfeminismwikiaorg-20200214-history
Economically Secure Tech Worker Privilege Checklist
Varying levels of economic security are represented in this checklist. Not every item is unique to technology, but all of them affect power relations between employers and employees, and between people who are ostensibly each other's peers, in tech. As an economically secure tech worker: * You can choose to alienate or decline a potential employer if its hiring/screening practices strike you as unethical, such as demanding social media login information. * You can choose to decline a potential employer if its greater business practices strike you as bad, such as deliberately building back doors into enterprise software. * You can choose to decline a potential employer if the task you would be hired to do would be distasteful or against your ethics, such as designing user interfaces to trick users into making questionable choices. * You have sufficient savings to support yourself and your family for several months. * You suffer from less performance anxiety about your job because you know that if you were fired, you could easily find another one and would have enough savings to support yourself in the interim. * You don't have children or aging parents to care for, or chronic illnesses requiring ongoing medical care and thus are free to work as a contractor, without benefits. * You know your skills are in demand, and you are likely to find another job if you need one, before your savings run out. (Some otherwise economically secure people such as women or people of color may be disadvantaged here.) * If your primary personal computer breaks/is stolen, you can obtain another sufficiently powerful machine without neglecting other financial responsibilities. * You're less likely to be late for work or miss work because your car broke down or because the bus you rely on runs behind schedule; because your child was sick and you couldn't afford to pay someone to care for them; or because you have a lengthy commute due to not being able to afford to live near work. * You don't have to worry about losing vacation days if you take time off when you're sick, because your employer tallies vacation days separately from sick days or even has unlimited time off. * You have a personal machine which is suitable for development work on current technologies. * When your personal machine becomes unsuitable for modern development, you can upgrade or replace it. * Your home internet is always on, stable, and fast enough. (Yes, this is an issue even in the San Francisco Bay Area.) * You can choose indefinitely recurring paid technical necessities (such as a $40/year email plan) because you know you will always have the money available when it is needed, therefore you do not need an ad-supported free version. * You can participate in expensive hobbies (e.g. "maker culture"), travel, and/or costly social events like Burning Man, giving you something to talk about with your co-workers as part of establishing informal working relationships. * You can afford the housing prices in areas which attract established or rising technical companies. * You can afford to go out to restaurants for lunch with your co-workers, saving yourself the time it takes to pack lunch at home, as well as improving your professional life by giving yourself opportunities for building informal working relationships. * You can afford the transit costs to work from the office in remote locations (such as office parks poorly served by public transit) or at atypical hours (when public transit does not run). * You don't suffer from stress and sleep deprivation arising from having to spend a large part of your day commuting from an area with affordable housing to an area where your tech company's office is. * If self-employed, you can afford sufficient health coverage that a major accident or illness would not be financially ruinous. (In the United States, prior to the Affordable Care Act.) * You can afford to buy a new technology in order to try it, even if it does not turn out to work as well as anticipated. * You can afford to invest in tools you're not sure you will use, or for projects you may never get around to completing. * You do not have to have to be hypervigilant over your micropayment budget (for small apps, single pieces of music, inexpensive ebooks) because it is unlikely to become a significant portion of your entertainment budget, or result in skipping a meal or outing if you miscalculate. * You have enough choices when it comes to employment that you can work from home -- either reducing your cost of living and increasing your disposable income, or improving the quality of your life and reducing stress. * If you work remotely, you can afford to pay for a co-working space membership and/or pay for food and drinks at coffee shops regularly, so as to have social contact while working. * If you're offered an appealing job in another city (or even country), you can afford to move. * When you get a raise or a bonus, you know you have the option of saving or investing the money, rather than paying off debt. * You feel free to negotiate your salary and benefits with a potential employer, confident in the knowledge that you don't have to just accept the first offer that comes along for the sake of paying rent for the next month. * You have parents whose economic support you can fall back on in case of unemployment. * You have sufficient privilege and experience to work as a consultant or independent contractor, giving you the freedom to choose your own working conditions and choose which clients to perform services for. You have sufficient savings to deal with the risks inherent in not working for a bigger company. * You have the option of working for a very early startup, because you know that if the company goes under, you'll have enough savings to support yourself while looking for a new job. * You have the freedom to start your own company, because you can pay for startup costs and/or have enough savings to support yourself for a period of time if your business fails. * You can afford to pay other people to do routine tasks (such as food preparation, laundry, housecleaning, child care) to free up more time for work, family, or leisure. * You can change careers if you want to, without feeling like you need to stay in a lucrative but personally unfulfilling job in order to pay off debts or support a family. * You have a spouse or partner who has a secure income and who you can rely on at least temporarily if you lose your own job. * You have been able to acquire specialized skills that are more in demand in the industry, but are also more difficult to access for marginalized people (e.g. functional programming, systems programming). * You can afford to take time off from your job to pursue a graduate degree that will raise your earning potential further, or even have an employer who will pay for you to do so. * If you do take time off from a job to go back to school, you will have enough savings that you don't have to worry about living on a limited grad student stipend, or about surviving pay disruptions due to funding agency problems. * If you want or need to, you can take potentially several years off from working in tech to find yourself, relax, de-stress, recover from physical or mental health issues, travel, explore hobbies, or explore potential alternate careers. * If you want to, you can experiment with working in a much-lower-paying job in a different profession, because you can fall back on savings. * You feel less trapped than your less-well-off peers because even while working full-time, you know you have the freedom to take unpaid time off if you so choose. * Your job provides you with health insurance, dental insurance, matching funds for retirement accounts, discounted stock buying options, and other benefits. * Your employer provides catered meals, free on-site laundry or haircuts, or other basic amenities that lower your cost of living even further. * You have reproductive choice, because you can afford to pay for child care, to support your partner in spending the bulk of their time caring for any children you have, or to take an arbitrarily large amount of unpaid leave to spend time parenting, and thus can decide whether or not to become a parent independently from economic considerations. * You have reproductive choice, because you can afford to save for retirement and not feel that you need to have children to care for you in old age. * You felt comfortable going straight from an undergrad degree to a job, giving you time to accumulate work experience -- and seniority -- that peers who attempted a Ph.D lost. Category:Privilege Category:Checklists